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From the movie "Hitman's run" of 1999

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the LCD of this PowerBook 520c of 1994 remind me the old lcd screens of the first 80's (calculators, old portable console, etc) searching on the net I see the PowerBook 520c has nice modern (for that years) LCD and was the first color laptop as I know. Judge by yourself

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Why this awful and old colours?

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    Using a bunch of garish colors for a business app would have been poor form and likely to get a bad reaction from your bosses… Commented Oct 2, 2022 at 14:16
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    It is a spreadsheet, the very definition of business app on a PC… Commented Oct 2, 2022 at 14:32
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    I don’t think apps get to decide the colour of the menu bar or the Apple logo in the top left; I think the answer is going to be something to do with filmmaking — no 520c ever had the seemingly non-backlit 1bpp display depicted. Commented Oct 2, 2022 at 14:35
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    Maybe film lighting was so bright that it completely overpowered the backlight, so the display mainly works as reflective LCD illuminated by studio lights. Commented Oct 2, 2022 at 15:07
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    @MichaelKarcher: I know nothing abuot the film, but your explanation seems highly plausible. Early RGB color screens were outrageously dim by modern standards, and films are often shot in conditions that are outrageously bright compared with office environments. Commented Oct 2, 2022 at 15:15

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The kind of LCD you are referring to when mentioning calculators or old portable consoles (like the Nintendo GameBoy) is called a "reflective LCD". These displays do not have a backlight, but depend on reflecting the light that comes from the front side. They have the clear advantage over back-lit LCDs that they work perfectly in bright sunlight, because they automatically get brighter when the outside light gets brighter.

Modern LCDs on the other hand rely on backlight which is transmitted just once through the matrix (transmissive LCD). They have the clear advantage over reflective LCDs that they work well in low-light situations. The color filtering to create the red, green and blue subpixels can happen between the backlight and the matrix. Even though these displays are not meant to be used in reflective mode (backlight turned off, image generated from reflected incoming light), they often also work in that mode, although quite badly. This is why the suggestion to "illuminate the display with a flashlight" to see whether the backlight is broken or the display doesn't work at all still works today with most LCD displays.

When filming a movie, you often have very bright studio lighting to allow for high quality imaging on the film material. This lighting might be so bright that it overpowers the backlight on that PowerBook so much that the transmissive part of the LCD is miniscule compared to the reflected studio lighting. So the unintended reflective properties of the display get filmed, whereas the intended transmissive part is no longer relevant.

If you happen to have an old color LCD, like the one in the PowerBook 520c at hand, you can try to reproduce the effect by taking the laptop into bright sunshine and check whether the display starts looking like in the movie.

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  • this, also the flicker aspect. Old backlit LCDs had very poor refresh rates, and would likely look like a flickery mess to a motion camera. Commented Oct 3, 2022 at 19:34
  • I don't buy the refresh rate point. Old LCDs were dead slow and not flickering at all. Even now, LCDs are hold-type displays that do not flicker like CRTs, which are impulse-type displays. Impulse-type displays have advantages regarding motion blur, so there are LCDs trying to imitate impolse-type displays, e.g. using "blinking backlight". That wasn't a thing back in the day, though. OTOH, the backlight is driven by fluorescent tubes, and the tube supply ("inverter") could cause backlight flicker, which might interfere with the 24Hz film rate. Commented Oct 3, 2022 at 21:25
  • I meant that the backlight would appear to flicker Commented Oct 3, 2022 at 22:56
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    @scruss: It's much easier to drive fluorescent tubes at higher frequencies (thousands of times per second) than at lower frequencies (e.g. sixty times per second), making backlight flicker a non-issue. Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 23:05

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